Vitreosity

Handmade in Britain

Article on the BBC TV series 'Handmade in Britain', with a mention that one episode is going to be on stained glass.

The stained glass bit -

Britain's Most Fragile Treasure, presented by historian Dr Janina Ramirez, unlocks the secrets of the famous East Window at York Minster, the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country.

Britain has a different approach to TV documentary on the arts & sciences, compared to America. They appear, at least recently, to actually cultivate academics for television presentation. More in science programs, with bona fide scientists like Brian Cox (physics), Jim Al-Khalili (physics), and Marcus Du Sautoy (mathematics) given pretty decent budgets to create documentaries. For their arts presenters, I suppose the trend is to try and get away from presenters who are just art critics and toward ones who at least have art history educations, like Tim Marlow or Matthew Collings. In any case, Britian does seem to produce many more arts or science television presenters/communicators in general than America does. After all, how many American art historians are signed up with a talent agency?

You can get a sense of Janina Ramirez's presentation style in this portion of a documentary about an Icelandic Saga on YouTube - The Laxdœla Saga part 1 of 4

[update: October 10, 2011 - the first episode airs today. I have not heard of it airing at all in the US, but I will pass along any info I get. There is a Handmade in Britain webpage for the series on the V&A website. Lots of interesting links, though I still don's see how it works that stained glass is a tiny subcategory of ceramics.]

Derix in Plano Texas

posted without comment

Bob Cassilly meets Laszlo Toth

Among the many tributes to Bob Cassilly showing up on the web this is one of the best, by a friend of his named John Foster - Remembering Bob Cassilly, Creator of the City Museum.

It relates the odd story about Bob's encounter with Laszlo Toth.
It's odd, a bit funny and very touching.
Read all the way to the end.

Bob Cassilly (1949-2011)

Bob Cassilly, the founder and creative driving force behind the City Museum, has passed away. Condolences to his family, friends and co-workers. This is a huge loss to St. Louis and to its art community in particular. Sad day.

3 minute interview with Bob Cassilly from 2008.

Over the years I've seen many family videos of visits to the City Museum, and this is one of the better ones trying to explain what the City Museum is, since there really is no other instituion like it. I'm not even sure any other city could replicate it if they wanted to.

Tales from Technomadia: City Museum

The video does manage to capture a general sense of the place, but still doesn't mention so many other things to see - the hall of architectural artifacts, the shoelace factory, the room with the opera posters, Beatnik Bob's, not to mention the aquarium.

My blog post from 2 years ago on Stained Glass at The City Museum.

GlassChat Today - Topic: Stained Glass

A reminder that TODAY is the day where, on twitter,
the weekly #glasschat topic is STAINED GLASS.

I'll be there.

I'll also post a link to the transcript when it's available.

p.s. - the easist way to follow a twitter based 'chat' is to use Tweetchat.
This makes it much easier to follow and participate.

The Transcript for the Stained Glass Glasschat is available. It was a very interesting experience. Lots if good links, with several groups mentioned that I had never heard of.

Habibi, a graphic novel

Not a post on stained glass, though I think it will be interesting to see if this will reach the SG world, in terms of its graphics. I've long thought that contemporary comics artists could end up having a serious influence on contemporary stained glass.
This book's official release is tomorrow and it's called Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I've been following the progress of this book for at least 3 years, through Thompson's blog - the Doot Doot Garden. His drawing skill is pretty stunning.

I can't speak for the story (yet), but the graphics look amazing.

AGG Pittsburgh 2012 - Call For Papers

The American Glass Guild conference is in Pittsburgh, July 20-22, 2012.
They are eager and open to hear all proposals for talks, panels, workshops etc.

Share your ideas!!

The deadline for submitting ideas for any proposals is coming up soon -
Friday, October 7th, 2011.

You can download a pdf with details here - AGG Pittsburgh Call for Papers Flyer
Or click on the image to download the pdf -

Glass Chat

Interesting new development in online discussion - twitterchat
In this case the discussion is about Decorative Glass.

Patricia Linthicum, who has a very interesting blog called Looking At Glass, also organizes a weekly chat session on twitter called #glasschat.

It happens every Thursday from 4-5pm ET.

The one coming up this Thursday is on "Architectural Glass"
Patricia told me that the chat on Sept. 22 will be on "Stained Glass".

You can look at transcripts from past chats on the #glasschat page.

I haven't participated yet though I did sit in twice so far and "watched" the chat live on Tweetchat. It is a bit hard to follow the line of discussion but you get used to it and the topics and observations are quite interesting. More so when you realize the people in the discussion are so spread apart geographically.